Hellraiser: Deader Blu-ray Review
Dead End
Reviewed by Michael Reuben, April 5, 2013
The
Hellraiser films have been steadily losing steam ever
since Clive Barker's original, which introduced the iconic demon known as "Pinhead". A fan of my acquaintance maintains that
the decline began immediately with the first sequel,
Hellbound, when Pinhead talked too much;
he was more frightening when he simply appeared and inflicted unimaginable pain. For me, the
series sputtered with the third film,
Hell on Earth, which expected the viewer to keep a straight
face while Pinhead's alter ego, Captain Elliot Spencer, solemnly declaimed about his and
Pinhead's "domains". Spirits with clearly defined territories are neither mysterious nor spine-tingling; they're just landlords in dispute.
But no matter at what point one wearied of Pinhead and his Cenobites,
Hellraiser had clearly
jumped the shark when Miramax's Dimension label (the same folks who brought us the
Scream
franchise) began merrily writing them into random horror scripts, just to squeeze out a few drops
of blood and a couple more shekels from an exhausted franchise. The
fifth,
sixth and seventh
chapters of the series were created in this fashion, the last being
Hellraiser: Deader. The film
began with an original script by Neal Marshall Stevens a/k/a Benjamin Carr (
Thir13en Ghosts)
that might have made an intriguingly atmospheric horror film if it had been given a chance. But
Dimension handed it off to a former former best boy grip named Tim Day with aspirations to
become a writer. By the time Day had finished shoehorning Pinhead and his signature puzzle box
into the mix, the result was a confusing mess that never makes sense, despite the efforts of a
decent cast, a talented, mostly Romanian crew, and a capable director, Rick Bota, who learned
his craft working as a cinematographer on
Tales from the Crypt and
House on Haunted Hill,
among others. They give more value for money than Day's hatchet job deserves.
HR: Deader has a promisingly
Se7en-ish
opening in a London crack den. A heedless
investigative reporter, Amy Klein (Kari Wuhrer), is there collecting material for an exposé.
When she shows what she has to her vaguely Mephistophelian editor, Charles (Simon Kunz), he
tells her to put it aside and plays her a videotape he's been sent from Bucharest. The tape appears
to show a young woman willingly committing suicide so that she can be resurrected by a guru
named Winter (Paul Rhys). It's the most concrete evidence seen to date of a rumored cult known
as "deaders". Charles dispatches Amy to Bucharest to investigate.
When Amy finds the apartment where the videotape was shot, it reeks of death and decay. Empty
except for a corpse, the apartment contains numerous indications that Winter and his followers
have been there. It also holds one of the puzzle boxes (known in the
Hellraiser mythology as a
"Lermarchand box" after its toymaker-designer) that is the key to summoning Pinhead (Doug
Bradley) and the Cenobites.
From this point on,
HR: Deader is little more than a series of spooky encounters with ghostly
figures and paranormal phenomena that are increasingly terrifying (for Amy) and bewildering
(for us). The patchwork script leans heavily on the tired device of ending a nightmarish situation
by having Amy wake up screaming in a place of apparent safety that we know, with the certainty
of dream-within-a-dream logic, will shortly turn sinister. Even Joey (Marc Warren), the anti-Winter cult leader from whom Amy seeks assistance,
probably isn't what he seems. How can you
trust someone who lives in the last car of a Romanian subway train with the windows all
covered, surrounding by quivering naked flesh, self-mutilated bodies, heavy drug use and art that
seems alive? As Joey eventually tells Amy, they share the same problem, which is that they never
know when to quit. (Joey's wording is more colorful.)
One can see in
HR: Deader the outlines of Stevens' original story, which must have involved an
effort by Winters to draw Amy into his circle and her struggle to resist. With Bota's direction and
the moody photography and production design, that movie might have been genuinely creepy.
But the effort to work the Pinhead mythology into the mix is so obviously labored that any
illusion is destroyed. Winter is said to a "descendant" of Lemarchand and therefore the puzzle
box's rightful owner, but for some reason he needs
Amy to open it. (Why? Beats me.)
Some sort of battle is being waged between Winter and Pinhead for control of Pinhead's
"domain" (there's that word again), but how Winter hopes to gain control of hell is unclear (yes,
hell; isn't that supposed to be Pinhead's "domain"?). Whatever the outcome, it appears that Amy
will be the loser. She can either be Pinhead's creature or Winter's. Then again, the final dream
sequence before the big showdown suggests a strange form of "escape" in which a younger
version of Amy executes her older self. These are the options?
Still, it's a
Hellraiser film. Fans will wait a long time if they can be certain that eventually
Pinhead will appear and rip people apart with chains. Rest assured that he does. It's just that now
he feels like a guest performer crashing someone else's gig. Wait a second—wasn't Amy sent to
Budapest so that she could figure out how Winter was managing to resurrect people in the first
place? And didn't Pinhead say he has nothing to do with that part of the story?
Oh, never mind.
Hellraiser: Deader Blu-ray, Video Quality
In the extras, director Bota discusses the cinematography of
Hellraiser: Deader, which was shot
by Romanian cinematographer Vivi Dragan Vasile in a dark and atmospheric style that is well
represented on Echo Bridge's 1080p, AVC-encoded Blu-ray. Vasile's generally cold palette is
dominated by blues, greys and whites, and his blacks are deep and solid. Sterile environments
like the Bucharest subway have the appearance of a morgue, and messy ones like the crackhouse
in the opening, the deader apartment and Joey's subway car resemble a charnel house. Because
the image is dark, detail doesn't "pop" off the screen, but it's good, if you look closely, even in
shadowed areas (assuming they haven't been deliberately cast into darkness). There's a visible
grain pattern, and although the image is somewhat soft, it doesn't appear that any detail has been
stripped.
Echo Bridge has mastered the 88-minute film on a BD-50 to accommodate the extras, but they
haven't taken full advantage of the space. The bitrate is 21.12 Mbps, which is adequate but
nothing special, and there is substantial unused space on the disc. Why pay for the larger capacity
if you're not going to use it? Still, compression artifacts were not in evidence.
